ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the fraught processes around communities’ resource rights in Myanmar’s forested landscapes under evolving conditions of dictatorship, militarisation, and violent conflict. Rural communities relied historically on customary tenure systems (CTS) to manage their forests and other resources, but, oppressed by colonial authorities and then since 1962 dictatorship, these customary systems and associated rights have not been recognised in statutory law. Communities have instead been subjected to cycles of conflict, adverse centralised jurisdiction, and resource ‘grabbing’. In 1995, the Union Forest Department (FD) initiated Community Forestry (CF), which appeared to provide some consolations for some villages. However, it provided neither meaningful statutory recognition of customary rights, nor federal decentralisation of resource governance. As democratisation processes gathered pace after 2008 the prospects for statutory recognition for CTS grew, and so CF’s appeal for communities declined. Its appeal for Union government and some donors increased, despite, in ethnic conflict zones, frequently strengthening Union government’s territorial jurisdiction. With the military’s illegal 2021 coup d’état, the elected but now underground National Unity Government’s federal decentralisation has become a uniting principle, and a new federal constitution has been drafted. Community resource management under an oppressive centralised government has become untenable, and self-determination based on resource federalism is now a democratic priority.
